Some companies water down their free software

I started looking for a document management tool. During my search, I landed on eDoc Organizer. I found the sales pitch for this software quite funny.

eDoc Organizer is designed for family use and for most people is absolutely free. Some companies water down their free software only to promote their upgrades at high prices later. That’s not how we treat our customers. We give you the exact same software, same features and protection, whether you have the basic, standard, business, or ultimate edition.

I started wondering how they could make money if they gave everything to everyone. Services? Ads? Not quite:

The only difference between the basic (free option) edition and the other editions is the amount of document storage. The basic edition holds up to 250 documents. For a household with ten different bills each month it amounts to over two years worth of storage. This should be sufficient for most customers, but for those individuals and businesses that want to use eDoc Organizer for more than household bills we do offer larger storage for a onetime software license fee.

A 250 documents limit? And you don’t count the number of documents as a feature?

It would be like Ubisoft giving out a game with all the features but with a 10 minutes time limit because most people won’t play the game for more than 10 minutes. I think it’s called a demo.

3 comments

It was interesting to read your perspective on it, but I respectfully disagree. A demo is something that demonstrates the functionality without being useful in an of itself. Just like your example of the 10 min video game limit. But we believe eDoc Organizer Basic edition is not a demo as it can be used by casual users without charge for a long time if not forever. To continue your videogame analogy, it would be similar to being able to play it only twice a week! Anyway, we have had upwards of 10,000 downloads and more than 99% of our customers are using the product without having to upgrade and we believe we provide more than demo functionality in our free product.

It seems to me that a 250 file limit is particularly low. I’d be curious to know what people use it for. If someone decides tomorrow to scan and destroy all his old bills, he would only be able to scan the last two years worth of bills (supposing he received 10 bills per month). He would max out that limit right away. One would think that many people search for tools such as yours because they already have documents they want to classify. That was my case.

Having said that, I’m glad you have the downloads and happy customers. I might even become one in the future, who knows?